Wednesday, April 22, 2015

A Happy Tandy Hills Earth Day With Fort Worth's Beatnik Loving Mayor

Or as the Tandy Hills Godfather, Don Young, put it today in an email's subject line:

Happy Triple bEarthday to Tandy Hills 2015.

According to Olive the Prairie Dog's parental unit, way back on this current day of April 22, in 1960, Fort Worth's beatnik-loving mayor, Tom McCann, and the Fort Worth City Council made the momentous decision to spend $138,250 for the 160 acre chunk of land now known as the Tandy Hills Natural Area.

As for the other parts of the triple part of today's bEarthday and the Tandy Hills.

Ten years after Fort Worth's beatnik-loving major decided to buy the Tandy Hills the first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970.

And then, 40 years later, on April 22, 2010, the Friends of the Tandy Hills Natural Area began a partnership deal with the City of Fort Worth where the city joined in the efforts to protect and restore the Tandy Hills.

The most interesting, to me, part of today's Earth Day Tandy Hills information is the fact that, apparently, way back in the 1960s, Fort Worth had itself a progressive mayor who liked the precursors of hippies, that being beatniks.

How did Fort Worth go from having a progressive beatnik-loving mayor to the era of mayor entities like Kay Granger, Mike Moncrief and Betsy Price? Can you picture any of those three signing a "National Beatnik Week" proclamation?

Well, okay, to be totally fair, which I always am, I guess I can see Betsy Price signing such a proclamation. There is something about Mayor Betsy that makes me think she could easily have been an active hippie during the hippie era. It would not shock me to learn that Mayor Betsy was at Woodstock being a Grateful Dead groupie.

Then again, I am not at all sure the Grateful Dead were at Woodstock....

Anonymous, Woodstock was held in California's Coachella Valley? All these decades I have been erroneously thinking Woodstock took place at Yasgur's dairy farm in the Catskills in New York, near the town called Woodstock.....